The Claws of the Bear: A History of the Soviet Armed Forces from 1917 To The Present

511 Pages·2014·2.68 MB·English

by  Brian Moynahan

The Claws of the Bear
A History of the Soviet Armed Forces from 1917 to the Present

Brian Moynahan
Copyright © Brian Moynahan 1989

The right of Brian Moynahan to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988.

First published in the United Kingdom in 1989 by Hutchinson Press Ltd.

This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
For my father
Table of Contents

Introduction: The Greatest Show on Earth
Part One – From Tsar to Stalin, by way of war, civil war and Siberia
Part Two – Barbarossa: The German War
Part Three – Curtain Fall
Part Four – The Mouth of the Cannon: Khrushchev and the Bomb
Part Five – Invasions: The Four Seasons
Part Six – The View from the Frunskaya Embankment: Present Strength
Part Seven – Future War
Extract from Into Darkness by Anton Gill
Introduction: The Greatest Show on Earth

The Red army, the world’s most powerful institution, is on view in Moscow. It
looks accessible and reassuring.
Troops from show divisions parade in Red Square, gloved, helmets suspended
motionless as boots hit the cobblestones outside the waxen body of Lenin in his
mausoleum. By St Basil’s Cathedral, an officer with staff tabs parks his car and
carefully puts its windscreen wipers in his issue briefcase as an insurance against
theft. Under the Kremlin Wall, a bride in a thin white dress throws her posy of
roses on the granite blocks at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The defence ministry lies a short distance downstream on the Moscow River
along the Frunskaya Embankment. It is a four-rouble ride from the Kremlin by
cab, a few seconds in the little Cessna in which a teenage German pilot came
calling and so ensured that an obscure general named Dmitry Yazov became its
minister.
It has fine views to Gorky Park and the Lenin Hills. A ferris wheel, edge on,
revolves in blue and red and cream. Summer queues in check shirts wait for beer
and ice cream. A gingerbread church upstream reminds of past loyalties to Tsar
and Christ. In winter, a plume of steam rises from the open-air bath.
Yazov, the controller of the Red army, orders the daily rounds of 5,096,000
servicemen, a figure that he can swell to 11,313,000 in a fortnight with the call-
up of active reserves. In the Soviet Union itself, they are scattered through
eleven time zones and behind ten borders from Norway to North Korea.
As the Red flag is lowered at dusk at the divisional headquarters in
Kaliningrad, in former German East Prussia, the sun is already rising from out of
Alaska over the garrisons of Kamchatka.
Others of his units are stationed in Eastern Europe, in Vietnam, Mongolia,
Cuba, Angola, Libya, Mozambique, Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Laos, in nuclear
bombardment submarines off the American seaboards, in long-range
reconnaissance aircraft in international airspace.
From here is decided the targeting of 1,386 intercontinental ballistic missiles
and 978 sea-launched missiles. A rocket from a ‘boomer’, one of the four or so
bombardment submarines on permanent station off the US east coast, could
vaporize Washington within five minutes of the order being sent from the
Frunskaya Embankment. The ICBMs would take a further twenty-five minutes
to arrive.
Add in the 53,000 tanks, the four surface Fleets, the fighters with their curious
Western codenames, Foxbats, Floggers, Flagons, Fiddlers, Firebars, the
satellites, and the factories that feed it, and this is a colossus. Against Yazov, the
Americans have 2.1 million men and 1.6 million active reserves.
Seen in Moscow, it appears bound to its desks and its parade grounds. A giant,
in terms of size, but a being with recognizably the same temperament and tastes
as its Western counterparts. It fits a familiar pattern that is made comforting by
the fact that Gorbachev and glasnost now rule and that arms cuts seem the order
of the day.
*
Only the slightest of ruffles, of names, play at its bloody memories and remind
how fraught is Yazov’s office how perilous the search for glasnost.
Mikhail Frunze, doctor’s son turned Bolshevik revolutionary and commissar
for defence, has a city and the main military academy named for him as well as
the embankment. He died under an operation in 1925.
The operation was not ordered by a surgeon. It was decided on by the
Politburo, the supreme political body whose anonymous black limousines and
bulky figures are on view within the Kremlin. The prompting came from a
predecessor of Gorbachev as party general secretary, Joseph Stalin. Frunze’s
death under the knife was almost certainly state-instructed murder. His
predecessor as defence commissar, Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Red army,
died with an ice-pick in his brain in exile in Mexico in 1940.
That, too, was murder ordered by the general secretary whose authority is now
enjoyed in unbroken line of succession by Mikhail Gorbachev.
Spend an evening wrapped in the athletic sensuality of the Kirov ballet, and the
nagging doubts of Frunze are lanced. The officers in the audience seem
abnormal only in their unmilitary and laudable passion for the dance. Millions of
Red army men[1] seem to stand easy, seventy-seven boomers submerge beneath
distant icecaps, covers slam over 1,951 missile silos, orders go out to ground five
Air Armies.
But Sergei Kirov was murdered, too, by a system that then honoured him with
three major cities, countless lakes and factories, a 23,000-ton cruiser class, and
the ballet. His death unleashed on the Red army and the blocks along the
Frunskaya a terror that glasnost has not fully dispersed. Khrushchev alone of
Lenin’s heirs, not Gorbachev, not the vain Brezhnev, not the secret policeman
Andropov, complained of the inhumanity of his inheritance.
Beneath the style, away from the Moscow parade grounds and the known
terrain of the general secretary and the stars and bit-part players of disarmament
talks, there is a different substance. Little is truly familiar in the modern power
of the Red army and in the awesome and often ghastly sweep of its history.
At its birth, within living memory, it fought and won a civil war and created
the world’s first communist state. Its leadership then subjected it to a terror
which, like the scale of the German invasion that swiftly followed, was on a
scale unknown to any previous army.
Engulfing Eastern Europe, it underpinned Russia as it turned into a superpower
with an ideology that raced into the poor parts of the world. The Soviet Union is
not a superpower because of its trade, its economic strength or the cultural
dynamic of its people. There are no worldwide Chicken Kiev franchises, no Ro-
Ro ships packed with export Zils and Zims. Its best-known writer lives in exile.
It maintains its empire and its superpower status thanks to military power
alone.
*
To the long burden of history, which contains so much of this violent century
within it, Yazov must add the present. What responsibility this man bears!
The Soviet Union has 22.3 million square kilometres of territory, half of
Eurasia and one sixth of the land surface of the planet. It traverses most of the
meridians of the eastern hemisphere. On the Chukotka peninsula and Wrangel
Island, it scrapes over the edge of the western.
Yazov’s men must guard it from 19 degrees 38 minutes east on the Polish
border to 169 degrees 59 minutes west at Cape Dezhnev across the strait from
Alaska. He knows it well enough. His last posting before Moscow was 8,333
kilometres away at Khabarovsk in the Far East, a westward journey of six days
on the Rossiya express. He also has the advantage of having accurate military
maps. The head of the Soviet Cartography Administration admitted in 1988 that
all maps for public use had been deliberately distorted on secret police orders for
more than fifty years. ‘Almost everything’ was changed, ‘roads and rivers
moved, streets tilted.’[2]
In latitude, the most southerly town is dusty Kushka with its peeling yellow
buildings and dirt roads on the Afghan border at 35 degrees north, below
Gibraltar in European terms, at a level with Memphis in American. The frozen
rock of Cape Chelyuskin huddles at the extremity of the landmass at 77 degrees
4 minutes north in Siberia. The archipelagos extend further north, to the 82nd
parallel at Cape Fligeli in Franz Josef Land.
Its vastness, and its proven ability to soak up enemies, Swedes, French,
German or White, is both a strategic blessing and a logistical and manning
nightmare for Yazov. Through routes from Poland to the Pacific exist only by air
and rail. There is no transnational highway.
The climate is another strategic ally, for long also a military secret so jealously
guarded that Soviet newspapers did not begin publishing weather maps until the
1970s. This, despite the US satellites that were equipped to deal with the
immensity of climatic change. From their lofty orbit, the satellites see weather
patterns that are affected by both the Icelandic and Aleutian lows as well as the
Iranian minimum. Western Russia is influenced by the Azores high. South-
easterly winds blown off the periphery of the Hawaiian high reach aircraft flying
over the coasts of the Far East. At the poles of cold, Oimyakon and
Verkhoyansk, in a depression where the coldest air concentrates on the upper
reaches of the Yana and Indigirka rivers in Siberia, the average January
temperature is below minus 50 degrees Centigrade and on some days drops to
minus 70. The rivers freeze to their beds of rock. Most of the country has
average winter temperatures below freezing and the average summer
temperature of the entire landmass is only marginally above zero Centigrade. It
is only in the Colchis, eastern Transcaucasia and the southern fringes of Central
Asia that January temperatures stay above freezing.
In the western part of the country, along the traditional invasion routes, severe
cold can start in November and persist in waves until late March. The average
snow depth in which Yazov’s mechanized units must operate is above thirty
centimetres. Only in the Baltic area and south of the Pripyat marshes are
temperatures above freezing for more than six months of the year. January and
February see the most severe cold, with temperatures dropping to minus 37
degrees Centigrade as arctic air advances across the central plains from the Kara
Sea. This cold is normally windless with brilliant clarity to the days, dawns with
bands of palest salmon pink and the sharp drop in temperature the Wehrmacht so
feared hurrying in with the rapid nightfall. The interceptors, radar and missile
systems of the Western air defence commands play complex manoeuvres with
pre-heat and low-temperature lubricants. The snowstorms that build heavy cloud
in the centre and north in November and December sweep into European Russia
with winds that produce a chill factor more dangerous than the steeper cold of
pure winter. In winter, the frozen rivers bring a vulnerability that only the
Mongols exploited.
The crews of Yazov’s attack and bombardment submarines are snugger in their
bases on the Kola peninsula than their northern latitude gives them any reason to
expect. The warmth of the North Atlantic Current and the Atlantic air masses
give the strategic north-western corner of Russia a mild winter. The January
temperatures in Murmansk are 18 degrees Centigrade higher than the average for
this latitude. The Barents and Murmansk seas never freeze, though they are
beyond the polar circle.
For campaigning, ‘March is a month without water and April is a month
without grass.’ The rivers are too thinly frozen in March to be used for transport
but too thickly for the ice to be broken for navigation. With the April rainstorms
comes the mud as soft as dough that sucked German panzers and half-tracks into
its maw.
Spring comes late. When it gets going in the steppelands in May, it has
traditionally provided the best campaigning weather. The grass is so thick that
the leading regiments in the great expansionary drives of the nineteenth century
marched barefoot to trample it down for the mass of animals and men moving
behind them to the sound of kettledrums. With snowmelt and light rain, the grass
is rich enough to forage but too wet to burn and there is winter wheat on the
arable land. Tanks are less concerned with grass. For their crews the mildness of
spring, the firm going and the absence of telltale plumes of dust from their tracks
make it the ideal fighting season.
Summer heat is intense and reaches 37 degrees Centigrade on the steppelands.
Wood and water are short and the steppe can burn from bursting shells. Tartars
would fire the steppe against the advancing Russians, forcing them to dig
firebreaks around the perimeter of their camps and to march along riverbanks.
Dust gives away the line of march and dirt roads corrugate into washboards,
shaking motorized infantry and straining tank tracks. Sudden rainstorms, as
cyclones pass from west to east, mire trucks before the drying sun releases them.
Visibility is clear across the long landscapes, making offensives easy to follow.
Temperatures rise deeper into the country and in the last century the Russians
‘lost great numbers by fatigue, want of water, travelling through these scorching
deserts, and by the plague’.
The garrisons in Verkhoyansk and Oimyakon whom Yazov equips to survive
winter must now cope with temperatures above 3o degrees Centigrade. In